Dick Francis - Enquiry

‘Yes, thank you, my Lord.’

It was ridiculous, the way my heart had bumped. Sweating palms, too.

‘Are you in any shape to come to London?’

‘I’m... I’ve got plaster on my leg... I can’t sit in a car very easily, I’m afraid.’

‘Hm.’ A pause. ‘Very well. I will drive down to Corrie instead. It’s Harringay’s old place, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right. I live in a flat over the yard. If you walk into the yard from the drive, you’ll see a green door with a brass letter box in the far corner. It won’t be locked. There are some stairs inside. I live up there.’

‘Right,’ he said briskly. ‘This afternoon? Good. Expect me at... er... four o’clock. Right?’

‘Sir...’ I began.

‘Not now, Hughes. This afternoon.’

I put the receiver down slowly. Six hours’ suspense. Damn him.

‘What an absolutely heartless letter,’ Roberta exclaimed.

I looked at her. She was holding the letter from my parents, which had been under Rosalind’s photograph.

‘I dare say I shouldn’t have been so nosy as to read it,’ she said unrepentantly.

‘I dare say not.’

‘How can they be so beastly?’

‘They’re not really.’

‘This sort of thing always happens when you get one bright son in a family of twits,’ she said disgustedly.

‘Not always. Some bright sons handle things better than others.’

‘Stop clobbering yourself.’

‘Yes ma’am.’

‘Are you going to stop sending them money?’

‘No. All they can do about that is not spend it... or give it to the local cats’ and dogs’ home.’

‘At least they had the decency to see they couldn’t take your money and call you names.’

‘Rigidly moral man, my father,’ I said. ‘Honest to the last farthing. Honest for its own sake. He taught me a lot that I’m grateful for.’

‘And that’s why this business hurts him so much?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve never... Well, I know you’ll despise me for saying it... but I’ve never thought about people like your father before as... well... people .’

‘If you’re not careful,’ I said, ‘Those chains will drop right off.’

She turned away and put the letter back under Rosalind’s picture.

‘Which university did you go to?’

‘London. Starved in a garret on a grant. Great stuff.’

‘I wish... how odd... I wish I’d trained for something. Learned a job.’

‘It’s hardly too late,’ I said, smiling.

‘I’m nearly twenty. I didn’t bother much at school with exams... no one made us. Then I went to Switzerland for a year, to a finishing school... and since then I’ve just lived at home... What a waste!’

‘The daughters of the rich are always at a disadvantage,’ I said solemnly.

‘Sarcastic beast.’

She sat down again in the armchair and told me that her father really seemed to have snapped out of it at last, and had finally accepted a dinner invitation the night before. All the lads had stayed on. They spent most of their time playing cards and football, as the only horses left in the yard were four half broken two year olds and three old ’chasers recovering from injuries. Most of the owners had promised to bring their horses back at once, if Cranfield had his licence restored in the next few weeks.

‘What’s really upsetting Father now is hope. With the big Cheltenham meeting only a fortnight away, he’s biting his nails about whether he’ll get Breadwinner back in time for him to run in his name in the Gold Cup.’

‘Pity Breadwinner isn’t entered in the Grand National. That would give us a bit more leeway.’

‘Would your leg be right in time for the Gold Cup?’

‘If I had my licence, I’d saw the plaster off myself.’

‘Are you any nearer... with the licences?’

‘Don’t know.’

She sighed. ‘It was a great dream while it lasted. And you won’t be able to do much about it now.’

She stood up and came over and picked up the crutches which were lying beside the bed. They were black tubular metal with elbow supports and hand grips.

‘These are much better than those old fashioned under-the-shoulder affairs,’ she said. She fitted the crutches round her arms and swung around the room a bit with one foot off the floor. ‘Pretty hard on your hands, though.’

She looked unselfconscious and intent. I watched her. I remembered the revelation it had been in my childhood when I first wondered what it was like to be someone else.

Into this calm sea Tony appeared with a wretched face and a folded paper in his hand.

‘Hi,’ he said, seeing Roberta. A very gloomy greeting.

He sat down in the armchair and looked at Roberta standing balanced on the crutches with one knee bent. His thoughts were not where his eyes were.

‘What is it, then?’ I said. ‘Out with it.’

‘This letter... came yesterday,’ he said heavily.

‘It was obvious last night that something was the matter.’

‘I couldn’t show it to you then, not straight out of hospital. And I don’t know what to do, Kelly pal, sure enough I don’t.’

‘Let’s see, then.’

He handed me the paper worriedly. I opened it up. A brief letter from the racing authorities. Bang bang, both barrels.

‘Dear Sir,

It has been brought to our attention that a person warned off Newmarket Heath is living as a tenant in your stable yard. This is contrary to the regulations, and you should remedy the situation as soon as possible. It is perhaps not necessary to warn you that your own training licence might have to be reviewed if you should fail to take the steps suggested.’

‘Sods,’ Tony said forcefully. ‘Bloody sods.’

Derek from the garage came while Roberta was clearing away the lunch she had stayed to cook. When he rang the door bell she went downstairs to let him in.

He walked hesitatingly across the sitting-room looking behind him to see if his shoes were leaving dirty marks and out of habit wiped his hands down his trousers before taking the one I held out to him.

‘Sit down,’ I suggested. He looked doubtfully at the khaki velvet armchair, but in the end lowered himself gingerly into it. He looked perfectly clean. No grease, no filthy overalls, just ordinary slacks and sports jacket. He wasn’t used to it.

‘You all right?’ he said.

‘Absolutely.’

‘If you’d been in that car...’ He looked sick at what he was thinking, and his vivid imagination was one of the things which made him a reliable mechanic. He didn’t want death on his conscience. Young, fair haired, diffident, he kept most of his brains in his fingertips and outside of cars used the upstairs lot sparingly.

‘You’ve never seen nothing like it,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t know it was a car, you wouldn’t straight. It’s all in little bits... I mean, like, bits of metal that don’t look as if they were ever part of anything. Honestly. It’s like twisted shreds of stuff.’ He swallowed. ‘They’ve got it collected up in tin baths.’

‘The engine too?’

‘Yeah. Smashed into fragments. Still, I had a look. Took me a long time, though, because everything is all jumbled up, and honest you can’t tell what anything used to be. I mean, I didn’t think it was a bit of exhaust manifold that I’d picked up, not at first, because it wasn’t any shape that you’d think of.’

‘You found something?’

‘Here.’ He fished in his trouser pocket. ‘This is what it was all like. This is a bit of the exhaust manifold. Cast iron, that is, you see, so of course it was brittle, sort of, and it had shattered into bits. I mean, it wasn’t sort of crumpled up like all the aluminium and so on. It wasn’t bent, see, it was just in bits.’